House of Sand and Fog

Published a year after its author’s death, House of Sand and Fog became an instant bestseller upon being selected for Oprah’s Book Club. While Oprah’s previous picks had mostly focused on female writers telling stories of female hardship, Andre Dubus’s novel stood out from the pack in that it dealt with not only a depressed young woman sliding into financial and alcoholic distress, but it also told the compelling story of an Iranian immigrant family trying to make ends meet in a world vastly different from the one they had left behind. What ties the family – especially its patriarch, Massoud Amir Behrani (an astounding Ben Kingsley) – to the young woman, Kathy Nicolo, is not only a house, but also an obsessive need to keep up appearances.

Jennifer Connelly (who seems to be cornering the market on emotionally distraught characters) plays Kathy, a recovering addict recently abandoned by her husband. Although Kathy is employed as a housecleaner, she appears to spend most days wallowing in bed, on the verge of tears. In this depressed state, she has failed to open any of her mail, and is thus shocked to find the police at her door one morning with an eviction notice for failure to pay specific taxes on the property, which was bequeathed to her by her father.

Frantic to win the house back before her mother’s visit in two weeks, Kathy enlists the help of legal aid and discovers that the taxes were levied accidentally by the county, and that she has every right to move back into the house. Unfortunately, this revelation comes too late, for the county has already sold the house to Behrani and his family. With the help of a police deputy friend (Ron Eldard), Kathy sets about convincing Behrani to return the property to her.

Behrani, however, remains unmoved. A former colonel in the Iranian army, forced to flee the country after the ayatollahs came to power, Behrani is a formidable figure determined to restore his family to its past glory. In order to provide his wife (Shohreh Aghdashloo) and children with a respectable enough lifestyle to marry his daughter off to "a good family," he has spent the past four years living beyond his means, sustaining his kin by working construction during the day and at a convenience store at night. The house, in his eyes, is an investment property, a piece of land bought at a bargain price that can be sold off at four times its value, thus enabling him to retire.

Like A Simple Plan or Fargo, House of Sand and Fog tells the story of simple mistakes that spin wildly out of control. Each character has his or her problems, but by and large they act with the best of intentions, thus adding to the tragic dimension of the film’s ending. Whereas In the Bedroom (also based on a story by Dubus) retained a somewhat uneven structure – family drama surrounding young son’s choice of older woman as girlfriend, followed by senseless act of violence, followed by completely out-of-character act of vengeance – House of Sand and Fog is composed more carefully, and in the end, much more effectively. Each action taken by Kathy and Behrani contributes to their undoing, and their mutual unraveling is slowly and elegantly unveiled. When a burst of violence occurs at the end, we have seen it coming but are nonetheless shocked by its power.